Year: 2017

I’m happy to announce the update of ATK Colored Expander based on the Audio Toolkit and JUCE. They are available on Windows (AVX compatible processors) and OS X (min. 10.9, SSE4.2) in different formats.

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I’m happy to announce the update of ATK Colored Compressor based on the Audio Toolkit and JUCE. They are available on Windows (AVX compatible processors) and OS X (min. 10.9, SSE4.2) in different formats.

In release 2.2.0, ATK gained new EQ filters that are vectorized. These filters cannot be used to filter different bands from the same input signal (yet), but they can be used to filter in the same way several channels.

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ATK is updated to 2.2.0 with the major introduction of vectorized filters. This means that some filters (EQ for now) can use vectorization for maximum performance. More filters will be introduced later as well as the Python support. Vector lanes of size 4 and 8 are supported as well as instruction sets from SSE2 to AVX512.

This is also the first major release that officially supports the JUCE framework. This means that ATK can be added as modules (directly source code without requiring any binaries) in the Projucer. The caveat is that SIMD filters are not available in this configuration due to the requirement for CMake support to build the SIMD filters.

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American universities have some reputation, in all kind of terms, and the amount of student debt is something I also found baffling. So a book on the failure of US universities was obviously of interest to me.

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When I started music almost thirty years ago, one of my music teachers told us that there was a difference between a flat and a sharp note. I didn’t really understand as on a trumpet, both would be the same! I forgot about it, until a few years ago, I was introduced ti the concept of temperament.

It started with he fact that the fifth in a scale has a mathematical relationship to the root note, and all other notes were built from there. At least for the 12 notes we have in the occidental world. Then, I read that at some point, this imperfect scale was replaced by another one, where all 12 notes were evenly split. Of course, that means that the fifth is not the fifth anymore…

Then, I watched a French video on it again, with the proper scientific explanation for different scales, and it got me thinking again. That was what my music teacher was talking about. If you build your scale with the harmonics, you end up with a difference between flats and sharps. But even more, I thought that a melody with flats was more melancholic than one with sharps. But this doesn’t make sense for an evenly tempered scale! They all feel the same way, no matter which scale you use. It’s only if you do like Bach and use an imperfect temperament that you can feel a difference.

So then a musical instrument like strings, or voices, can actually work in a pure temperament. For winds, you can work on adjusting notes on the fly, and also have kind of pure temperament. On a piano, you can’t, you need to tune it right (BTW, I still don’t know how piano tuners can tune pianos when you have to tune them “imperfectly”! Their job is just amazing), or it will feel different from with a symphonic orchestra that can use a pure temperament of any scale.

And this is something quite difficult to achieve with a digital instrument. We expect equal temperament. I wonder how Celemony handles these differences when they tune a voice track.

Anyway, maybe the pure scale is imperfect because the 13th note is not exactly the same of the original note, maybe the equal temperament makes everything similar, but they all bring something. We shouldn’t probably forget about these differences and use them in modern music as well.

As some may know, I’ve switched from wdl-ol to JUCE 5 for my free plugins. In the past, I had to modify by hand all the projects created by the Projucer. And each time JUCE is updated, I need to add these changes to the generated project.

Not anymore.

On the develop branch, and in the next minor release ATK 2.1.2, modules for the Projucer will be available. This will enable an easier integration of ATK in your project, as you will “just” need to add these modules to the Projucer (and some additional include files to make ATK compliant with JUCE hierarchy).

There are currently 11 new modules (shameless comparison, that’s far more than the new DSP module, even if there are some filters than I’m missing, but feel free to propose a pull request with new features!).